Asus' dual-screen Taichi tablet-laptop hybrid on sale for $1299

Asustek’s innovative laptop-tablet hybrid called Taichi is now on sale in the U.S. starting at $1,299.

At first glance, the Taichi looks like a standard ultrabook with an 11.6-inch touch screen when in laptop mode. However, closing the laptop activates another 11.6-inch touchscreen on the back of the panel, turning the hybrid device into a tablet.

“You’ve seen notebooks and tablets. But you’ve never seen anything like the Asus Taichi 21,” Asus said on its website. The Taichi will ship with Windows 8, and the screens can display images at a 1920 by 1080-pixel resolution.

Asus’s Taichi, previewed at the Computex show in June, has two screens that makes it a laptop and tablet.

But the Taichi’s two-screen frame comes at a hefty price. The Taichi 21 DH51, with an Intel Core i5 processor and 128GB solid-state drive storage costs $1,299 on Amazon.com, B&H, Newegg and TigerDirect.

A Taichi 21 DH71 with a Core i7 processor and 256GB SSD storage can be ordered for $1,299 from Amazon.com and for $1,599 from Newegg and TigerDirect.

The models will ship after Oct. 26, according to the retail websites. The hybrid models will offer up to five hours of battery on a 6-cell battery. Also included in Taichi are 4GB of memory, Intel integrated graphics, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The laptops have a micro-HDMI port and two USB 3.0 ports. The Taichi weighs about 1.27 kilograms and also has a 5-megapixel webcam.

Also going on sale is Asus’ VivoBook X202, which has an 11.6-inch screen and can be ordered for $599 on Amazon.com. The Windows 8 ultrabook has a Core i3 processor, 4GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive. The ultrabook weighs 1.3 kilograms and offers five hours of run time on one charge of a 2-cell battery. The display can show images at a maximum resolution of 1366-by-768 pixels.